(no subject)
Have you noticed the exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Proselytizers seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around… from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?
It’s a war for your soul on every front. And those much-contested desires are all constructed, anyway-they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family-for those who still have even that- is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters-and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We ‘want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.
Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires-no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self- you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy for the man who spends his life talking on his cell phone and attending business meetings and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be happy when he arrives home from work in time for his favorite sitcom-but it is a very different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.
If our desires are constructs, if we are the products of our environment, then our freedom is a question of how much control we have over that environment. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic supermodels. It’s nonsense to say a man is free to live as he pleases when everything he needs to do to acquire food, shelter, companionship, and a sense of accomplishment is already established and all that remains is for him to choose between prefabricated options. We must make our freedom by forging the realities which, in turn, fashion us.
This sounds like a lot to ask. But change, revolutionary change, is going on everywhere all the time-and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. Our lives are vastly different today than they were even a mere decade ago. The question is simply whether we take responsibility for our part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of our own power, or frame our actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally as if we were purely victims of circumstance.
Forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen-the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom-but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing everyone’s lives, they are rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.
If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we could adapt to any world, too. But spending your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually a step behind, at the mercy of history as it unfolds. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose to pursue.
Don’t be too hard on yourself about the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you-not with any amount of will-power. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it-that create, in the process of satisfying the old desires, conditions that foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will help you depose them from the pedestal you put them on; if you wish to lead others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.
Indulge and Undermine
Crimethinc.
www.crimethinc.com
*****************************
I just got a neurotic valley house wife to purchase anarchist literature. She's very excited about it. :)
And another one to send them her packing peanuts. This is the advice I give working for the City of Los Angeles.
Woohooo!
It’s a war for your soul on every front. And those much-contested desires are all constructed, anyway-they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family-for those who still have even that- is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters-and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We ‘want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.
Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires-no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self- you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy for the man who spends his life talking on his cell phone and attending business meetings and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be happy when he arrives home from work in time for his favorite sitcom-but it is a very different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.
If our desires are constructs, if we are the products of our environment, then our freedom is a question of how much control we have over that environment. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic supermodels. It’s nonsense to say a man is free to live as he pleases when everything he needs to do to acquire food, shelter, companionship, and a sense of accomplishment is already established and all that remains is for him to choose between prefabricated options. We must make our freedom by forging the realities which, in turn, fashion us.
This sounds like a lot to ask. But change, revolutionary change, is going on everywhere all the time-and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. Our lives are vastly different today than they were even a mere decade ago. The question is simply whether we take responsibility for our part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of our own power, or frame our actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally as if we were purely victims of circumstance.
Forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen-the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom-but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing everyone’s lives, they are rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.
If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we could adapt to any world, too. But spending your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually a step behind, at the mercy of history as it unfolds. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose to pursue.
Don’t be too hard on yourself about the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you-not with any amount of will-power. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it-that create, in the process of satisfying the old desires, conditions that foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will help you depose them from the pedestal you put them on; if you wish to lead others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.
Indulge and Undermine
Crimethinc.
www.crimethinc.com
*****************************
I just got a neurotic valley house wife to purchase anarchist literature. She's very excited about it. :)
And another one to send them her packing peanuts. This is the advice I give working for the City of Los Angeles.
Woohooo!